Monday, September 13, 2004

Open Access Articles From The NIH

Open access articles are a topic we have talked about before. Simply put, open access would allow scientific articles to be available on line, without fee, or delay.

This is a hot topic for the obvious commercial reasons. Most scientific publications are for profit and very profitable businesses.

With an open access concept there would be no delay in the publication of an article and free access at the time of publication. Today most publishers charge for web access and only after 6 months to a year do they make articles available without a charge.

The NIH is drafting a document that would require all scientific research articles that have any NIH funding attached to them to be made available within 6 months of publication and without charge. This is a compromise to the publishers who have been worried about access from day one.

This is a dicey issue for the same reason that drug and clinical trial access is a hot potato.

The world is asking for access, transparency and equality on a level playing field. Who would be against that theory?

Comments

I think 6 months is too long to wait for publication of NIH-funded articles. I think that docs and the public should have immediate access to these articles. Still, it's progress to see that the NIH is endorsing such a process. I wait for the day when all online journals will be available for free, but alas, that requires funding; and as Mr. Stern writes, who will pay?

Open-access privileges to newly published articles that have NIH funding attached to them would be a help to many people in MedEd, but then publishers of such articles would have to find ways to make up lost subscription revenues, wouldn't they? I'm no expert on magazine/journal publishing but, judging from the extent to which magazines seem to be sustaining current operations by borrowing from future revenues, giving article access away for free could be a burden publishers don't need and can't handle——in other words, maybe what's free won't be free. In the end, someone WILL pay, maybe the articles' authors, maybe the consumers.